Sylvia Beach, Adrienne Monnier, and Paris’s Enduring Shakespeare and Company Bookstore

In today's Love Letters to..., Alicia introduces us to two women who blazed their own trails in life, eventually blazing them together. France's Adrienne Monnier established a unique business on Paris's Left Bank as a bookseller and booklender in 1915, with a special focus on supporting the community of women readers. American Sylvia Beach, inspired by the intellectual milieu she enjoyed at Adrienne's La Maison des Amis des Livres, opened the famed English-language bookshop Shakespeare and Company four years later. They didn't only inspire each other in business; these two literary women fell in love and were a couple for the next 36 years, until Adrienne's death in 1955. In their years together, they championed some of the most important literary voices of their generation, including James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, and Ernest Hemingway, and left a lasting legacy in the form of today's Shakespeare and Company.

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